"The Risk I Took to Make My Business Soar"

The number of women-run companies in the United States has jumped 25 percent since 2002. But striking out on your own requires serious sacrifices--and the ability to stay calm under freak-out-level pressure. The women you're about to meet are headed for mega-success, but they don't sugarcoat what it took to get there. Let their honesty motivate you:

"I uprooted my whole family for this."

The inspiration for Christy Prunier's tween skin-care line, Willa, came in the form of a simple--and kind of whiny--bath-time question from her then-8-year-old older daughter. "Mommy, why do I have to use Julia's baby soap?" Willa asked. "Isn't there anything for girls my age?"

"I thought it was a great question," says Christy, 43. "But all I turned up when I looked was the made-in-China pink junk that wouldn't do her skin any good." Christy began talking to anyone and everyone about her idea to make products of her own, and eventually got connected with a dermatologist who could help formulate her body washes and lotions. Another networking bull's-eye: "I met a woman who sold her apparel line at Target, and she introduced me to her buyer."

The big-box retailer agreed to sell the Willa line in 300 of its stores. That was, of course, if Christy could meet their order demands. The pressure was on. She teamed up with a local beauty laboratory, but every test run and ingredient tweak cost money, which her company wasn't making yet. So last year, Christy and her husband realized they could free up a lot of cash fast by moving from New York City to a cheaper place in Connecticut, and transferring the kids from private to public school. She agonized over it, feeling guilty that she was forcing her family to overhaul their lives for an idea that could flop. "It took a lot to get my game face on to sell my kids on a new town and a new school," she admits. "I know they miss their friends."

With so much on the line, she still works from her kitchen table to keep costs down. "It's not a big deal to take meetings at Starbucks," laughs Christy, who says that facing such high stakes only motivates her to make sure the brand, which went on sale in March, succeeds. It helps that the most important girls in her life--Willa and Julia, now 12 and 6--love the company too. "They get excited about seeing it in stores, knowing they played a big part in getting us there," Christy says. "And Willa's happy she doesn't have to use her baby sister's soap anymore!"

"I had to beg and barter to get started."

For years after she quit practicing law to become a stay-at-home mom, Michele Colucci says, she would field questions from family and friends in legal trouble. Then a lightbulb went off: Why not create a website where people could search for lawyers to answer their questions or take on cases without upfront fees? She'd make her money by only charging clients if they won, and would help people in the process: "Too many people get screwed in court because they can't afford good representation," she says. But right when she began interviewing web designers in 2008, the economy tanked, her husband filed for divorce, and "I went from living in a million-dollar home to struggling to pay the rent on a run-down place for my three boys and me," says Michele, 47. Still, her messy divorce-court battle underscored how in-demand a site like hers would be, so without any tech skills and little money to hire someone, she got scrappy and used the sites programmingbids.com and jobnob.com to search for affordable talent. "I found people who were eager to work just for the rÉsumÉ experience," she says. "I was able to design the site for a few hundred dollars." Meanwhile, she was roughing it at home. "I'd turn off the heat whenever the boys went to stay with their dad. I couldn't let them be cold, of course, but when I was on my own, I'd tough it out." She also relied on message boards like the Freecycle Network and Craigslist to get necessities, including office furniture, for free or on the cheap. "Every trade-off I made was worth it," she says. In four years she's raised almost $1 million in investment capital for mylawsuit.com, and the site has attracted more than a hundred lawyers as clients. "When you have three little mouths to feed, failure is not an option," says Michele.

"I was forced to buy my groceries on credit."

When Leah Brown watched her favorite uncle die of AIDS in 1987, she was angry, grieving, and desperately motivated to join the fight against the disease that had ravaged him. But how? The answer didn't come until nearly a decade later, when she found herself divorced and downsized from her job as a health-care consulting exec. She finally had the time, and a little extra money from her severance package, to start a company that could help sick people in underserved communities. She called it A10 Clinical Solutions, and her goal was to get hired by drug companies and research centers to handle all the behind-the-scenes details that come with running clinical trials for diseases like AIDS and diabetes, which disproportionately affect minorities. Leah's old job provided her with plenty of connections to doctors who could help. "But did I know what I was doing? Absolutely not!" she says. "It was a mixture of passion and insanity that got me going."

Leah remembers being laughed out of several banks when she went asking for a small-business loan, so she decided to take out a $150,000 home-equity loan on the house she shared with her young sons, then 12 and 9--a move that scared her silly: "If I couldn't pay it back, we'd lose the roof over our heads," Leah, 48, says. "But I had to take the chance." And she wasn't just hiring employees with borrowed money; without an income, she had to use the loan to pay her personal bills. "I worried constantly about going bankrupt," she admits. Accordingly, she ran the business and her personal life on a shoestring budget. "When a girlfriend said she was donating clothes to the Salvation Army, I said, 'Right now, I'm your Salvation Army!'" Leah wore those suits to client meetings.

As drug companies signed on, she focused on making it to the five-year mark, which most start-ups never hit. But right after its swanky fifth-anniversary party, the company lost a $6 million contract. "Most people would've quit, but I had a staff who depended on me," she says. "I hit the pavement and wrangled new clients like it was day one." Her tenacity paid off: A10 is on track to do $25 million in business this year. Still, Leah won't let herself get too comfortable. "When you run a business, things mess up again and again," she says. "A true entrepreneur knows how to navigate out of the storm, no matter how tough it gets."